Vox Populi
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Miriam Levine: Fireweed
Unlike you
I’m not meant to die.
The wind drops my seed on
burnt ground, on charred
stumps as they cool.
I sprout in the ruin and fringe
the cellar holes. On clumps of ashes
in the damp. They nourish me, my
raised standards, rose-red,
free of canker and black spot,
free of all sickness— unlike you.
Yet aren’t there lulls
in your sobbing, aren’t there
spells of forgetfulness, walls
of niches for the ashes of your dead?
Of all the names you dare to
give me, there is only one worth
a breath.
~~~
Miriam Levine is the author of Forget about Sleep, her sixth poetry collection, winner of the 2023 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award. Another collection, The Dark Opens won the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Levine lives in Florida and New Hampshire.
Copyright 2024 Miriam Levine
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Miriam: I’m a day late conveying praise and adulation for your vivid poems. I wrote three responses yesterday and each time I tried to edit my message, it disappeared. I’m trying once again to give thanks and convey my pleasure for your rapt, incisive poems—not a wasted word, nor unconsidered essential in each (as I read the whole VP anthology again poem by poem.) I am grateful for your life.
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A question for Miriam:
Is “Candlewood” a lakeside place in Connecticut in this poem? My maternal grandparents, Don and Katherine Herold, had a summer home there during my childhood. Don was a Classic Cartoonist, humorist and Advertiser and had an office in Manhattan. I’d love to know if your Candlewood is the same beloved place.
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Yes, Sean: Candlewood Lake in CT is the setting. I was there a few weeks ago to visit a friend who has a place on the lake.
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Thank you, Sean. You go the extra mile for our community.
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Thank you, Sean. Let’s read on together, and write, too.
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I remember the beautiful fireweed in the Northwest Territories. I don’t think we have it here in Southern California where people hide the desert with tropical landscapes sucking on precious water. But we have fires. We have death. And we share the shadow creeping across the shire.
(Well that was an interesting leap. I love free associating after reading Vox Populi. Sometimes it takes me to weird places. Perhaps in the beauty and richness of the words so generously given, my morning brain stretches and fires an extra neuron or two to let me know it still remembers and cares beyond my perpetual Groundhog Day. )
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I love your riffs here, Barbara.
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beautiful Miriam.
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I agree. Thank you.
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Nature is renewal, experimentation and we, though some are in denial, are a mere result of that process. We as part of this randomness continue, for better or worst, through our seed. I wish I were as beautiful and useful as the Fireweed I saw a few weeks ago while walking around a nearby lake.
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I find it comforting to think of fireweed, earthworms and other living things that heal and transform the land.
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life sings and death listens and says oh yeah, listen to this.
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nice haiku, John.
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Yours for the song!
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